We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply.The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster.

Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.Compare today to the way things were a decade or a century ago. The world is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.But being an optimist isn’t about knowing that life used to be worse. It’s about knowing how life can get better. And that’s what really fuels our optimism. Although we see a lot of disease and poverty in our work—and many other big problems that need to be solved—we also see the best of humanity. We spend our time learning from scientists who are inventing cutting-edge tools to cure disease. We talk to dedicated government leaders who are being creative about prioritizing the health and well-being of people around the world. And we meet brave and brilliant individuals all over the world who are imagining new ways to transform their communities.

David Hain's insight:

Bill and Melinda Gates annual letter preaches optimism despite all the bad news we appear to have around us!

We identified 13 levers, or “characteristics,” that appear to accelerate the adoption of technologies and practices that have been implemented by innovation leaders but are new to less advanced firms.1 Six of those 13 levers can be influenced directly by the actions of businesses themselves, largely independent of broader factors such as competition, education, regulation, and infrastructure quality.

The application of these six levers varies widely among firms within countries and across different geographies (exhibit). For example, professional management practices that drive diffusion have been more widely adopted, on average, in German and US firms than in firms in other countries. On the other hand, Japanese firms tend to benefit more than others from access to plentiful science and technology talent. UK firms, in turn, stand out for their external collaborations with the strong local-science base and for their embrace of value chains that are advanced, global, or both.

David Hain's insight:

Technology uptake is potentially a game changer, but getting people to take it up can be the biggest challenge. Some relatively simple tips here.

Can we please agree that there is no such thing as a corporate entrepreneur?

The term corporate entrepreneur devalues what real entrepreneurs do, and it creates a haze of hokum around people trying to innovate in large companies that sets them up to fail.

There is an ocean of difference between people innovating or designing new offerings inside a large company, and actual entrepreneurs. On one shore of the ocean is certainty — the steady paycheck, the options vesting, status, the cushiness of a corporate campus — and on the other is the possibility of incredible wealth. Fly-your-own-plane-to-your-own-private-island-level wealth. And in between the two shores are a million ways to fail, to sink without a trace.

I have now interviewed hundreds of actual entrepreneurs — including founders of Amazon, Apple, Biogen, Boston Scientific, iRobot, Netflix, PayPal, and YouTube — as well as new venture and innovation leaders in large companies like Disney, Target, Toyota, and Coca-Cola.

Five things differentiate the former from the latter:

David Hain's insight:

This article articulates a felling I have long had. Entrepreneurs are out there entrepreneuring and worrying about how to pay the mortgage. The rest of us are just trying to make change happen.

Hard-core individualists who doubt leaders’ need for supportive teams should consider the famous study by Harvard Business School professors Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohira. They studied more than 1,000 “rock star” analysts — securities analysts named by Institutional Investor magazine as among the best in their industry over a period of eight years, from 1988 to 1996. They found that when stars switched firms, their job performance fell and they rarely reached the heights of their previous success. The causes of this performance plunge are multifaceted. But the authors concluded that losing the teamwork and relationships at the places where the analysts became stars were important contributing factors.

What makes coaching effective, and what’s the role of emotional intelligence (EQ)?New research published in the Journal of Experiential Psychotherapy (Stillman, Freedman, Jorgensen, & Stillman, 2017) reiterates the powerful link between EQ and effective coaching. . . both for coaches and clients.

David Hain's insight:

More proof, if further were needed, that coaching really improves leadership performance. But not all coaching is equally effective...

The research was based on a survey of over 1100 coaches and clients from 88 countries conducted by Six Seconds, a global pioneer in emotional intelligence. The goal of the survey was to understand a) what blocks clients’ progress, b) what methods are most powerful for coaching, and c) why is EQ important in coaching?

Our people need their own multicultural competency if they are to understand the diverse needs of our customers. I call it “cultural dancing.” You don’t have to be Filipino to have that competence. You don’t have to be Indian or Turkish. But you do have to be open-minded to people’s needs and willing to step away from the perspective with which you see the world.

You also have to be willing to look beneath the surface, to look beyond the apparent first meaning of the words someone is using. Because the person speaking may not be using their primary language, it’s up to the listener to actively participate in finding out what the person actually means by what they say. If you’re only used to your home culture, you don’t have to do that. You can take things more at face value. But if you grew up in a multicultural environment, you think to yourself, “Maybe they didn’t mean it exactly like it sounds. Maybe there’s a second thought, a second meaning behind the first one.” That openness is important if you are on my leadership team.

David Hain's insight:

How Western Union deals with customers in many countries. But diversity is more than just national cultures, and these skills and attitudes apply to any divers group, internally and externally.

Kausik takes a look at how leaders are changing in the business world.

Kausik Rajgopal is a Director at McKinsey and leads McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office. He co-leads McKinsey’s Payments Practice, and formerly led the West Coast Organization and Change Management Practice.

Some thoughts for people who are contemplating a radical career change.John told me that he had experienced an identity shift. He now thinks of himself as a novelist, not as a leader or consultant. And as a novelist, he is already contemplating his next work.I was struck by how much we are shaped by our self-images, and how much our self-images shape our choices. There may be more choices available than you are currently considering, if you are willing to set your identity aside, put the effort into learning new skills, and have the tenacity to see it through. It also helps, as was the case with John, if it is something you are excited and passionate about.

David Hain's insight:

I coach many people who feel trapped in one way or another. It doesn't have to be that way...

What is Trust?As important as trust is, one of the problems is we are not always talking about the same thing when we talk about trust. Trust is a general, all-encompassing word that means many different things.Huge misunderstandings can occur when we talk about “trust.” If you say you don’t trust someone, do you mean you don’t believe they are honest or do you mean you don’t believe you can depend on them to get the job done on time? If someone says they don’t trust you, what exactly don’t they trust?There are different levels and intensity of trust. Honesty is a more basic level and has a stronger intensity than dependability.Understanding the levels of trust and their intensity can help you build a strong foundation of trust and communicate more clearly when others violate your trust.

David Hain's insight:

Excellent article on the most important factor in all relationships - trust. @JesseLynnStoner well worth following on leadership things that matter!

Rather than succumb to the hyperbole and false promises found in so much management writing, business strategists would do far better to improve their powers of critical thinking. Wise executives should be able to think clearly about the quality of research claims and to detect some of the egregious errors that pervade the business world. Indeed, the capacity for critical thinking is an important asset for any business strategist—one that allows the executive to cut through the clutter and to discard the delusions, embracing instead a more realistic understanding of business success and failure.

David Hain's insight:

Roughly 1500 books about 'leadership' are published each year, not to mention numerous articles, case studies, and white papers. The majority promise to 'show the way'. No wonder there is a temptation to try the ideas. But context and critical analysis are much more valuable than magic bullets. Beware fad surfing!

In recent years, I’ve noticed that enquiries for team development and coaching, invariably start with the statement: “we (or they) need to be a high performing team.” On face value, this strikes me as a reasonable request. However, I’ve learnt that this statement covers a whole range of ills, dysfunctionalities and possibilities. It gets used as a proxy for ‘help us sort out our problems…without risking exploring what these might be’.

In truth, there are no off-the-shelf answers to what constitutes high performance for a leadership team. Every team needs to work it out for themselves. However, we believe that there are important questions that a leadership team needs to ask itself which can act as a starting point of a conversation or development process.

Below are ten questions we think it is important for every leadership team to ask itself:

David Hain's insight:

Useful diagnostic to discuss with your leadership team - then act on the results!

Chaotic, largely unexplored, and fraught with risk, yet immensely promising” is a description of the coaching industry from “The Wild West of Executive Coaching,” a 2004 ground-breaking article in Harvard Business Review by the president and CEO of the Executive Coaching Network, Alyssa Freas, and U.S. top 50 coach Stratford Sherman.Flash forward more than a decade later. Are we still in the midst of a coaching rodeo? Has the field continued to gallop ahead but in many directions?The answer is complicated. It is true that the executive coaching industry still comes with its share of fuzzy evaluation metrics, a lack of standard qualifications and uneven execution, but in many ways, the field has also evolved — and in unexpected ways.Here I examine the areas in which the executive coaching industry has properly evolved — as well as the areas where there is still room for improvement.

David Hain's insight:

Interesting viewpoint on the state of executive coaching. Well on the way, but with a fair distance to go on both supply and demand side.

Already, a growing number of firms are betting that more and better use of data can give them a tangible competitive boost in the here and now: more detailed knowledge, and better analysis - of customers, employees and the business environment - have the potential to reduce risk and uncertainty and radically improve decision-making. In an information age, competitive edge will surely accrue to those firms which use information best. Won’t it?

We shouldn’t assume so. Managers are wrong to put their faith in any such certainty, argue Jonas Ridderstrale and Julian Birkinshaw in their new book, Fast/Forward. The title sums up a deceptively simple theme: in a fast-changing world, mountains of data and super-detailed analytics can get us only so far. Indeed, they carry risks of their own. Ridderstrale and Birkinshaw observe that many companies are more comfortable analysing and debating than acting decisively and intuitively. The default assumption that more and better information is always better actually cramps companies’ ability to move fast. To navigate the future, the ability to act with decision and purpose will trump big data. Priorities need to be reversed.

David Hain's insight:

With big data, it's less likely that the analysis is the problem, more likely that strategic decision making doesn't cut it. Enter, iteration, adaptation and adhocracy - but they need a big mindset change from our top-down past!

Mauricio knew that he must carve out time for strategic conversations with his leadership team, but during a one-on-one coaching session he told me he was puzzled. When he had suggested to his leadership team that they have these conversations, people had nodded their heads and said they’d raise strategic agenda items. Yet their meetings continued to focus on the day-to-day numbers, operational processes, and immediate crises.

Unfortunately, this scenario is common for many leadership teams — when facing immediate concerns, it’s difficult to remain strategic. Senior executives need to balance the long- and short-term demands of their businesses, and meetings need to mirror this balance. But they rarely do when executives don’t realize the pitfalls of meetings that conflate strategy and operations.

David Hain's insight:

I come across this scenario all the time. Short term stuff gets complained about, but top teams keep on doing it. Strategy is longed for, but rarely happens because of the previous scenario. Maybe people just play to what they're good at and avoid the stuff (without easy answers) in the 'too difficult' box? Or maybe they haven't left operational management behind. Whatever, it creates a vicious cycle...

The world’s a mess, times are turbulent and almost every business is facing disruption. It’s all too much! Whatever next? Sadly we don’t have a crystal ball but here’s the next best thing. We proudly bring you some of London Business School’s finest minds looking ahead to 2018 and sharing their depth of expertise. From big tech to individual consumer behaviour, from adult learning to the impact of AI, from happier employees to better leaders and a more inclusive workplace – it’s all here. You’re welcome.

David Hain's insight:

Some positive business trend predictions from LBS for 2018. I hope they are right!

How do we promote our leaders? How do we decide that a person is ready to take on a role with a brand new remit and unfamiliar responsibilities? We do it trusting that a person will succeed, based on often nothing more than a hunch. “But wait!” I hear you cry. “People are promoted based on their success in their current role. It’s how it works everywhere.” This is true. People are promoted to the next level based on their previous performance. But does this make sense?

David Hain's insight:

Leadership transitions are notoriously difficult and often unsupported - hence, many failures and much potential lost. This insightful framework could help...

There are basically two types of person: one that believes that there are two types of person, and another that doesn’t. Despite having reservations about over-simplistic categorization, there are some theories which carry both practical wisdom and managerial relevance. One of the inspiring ones is the distinction between hedgehogs and foxes made by British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He distinguishes between people who strive for a coherent world view with logic and an organising principle (hedgehogs), and others who are comfortable with loose ends and with not relating things systematically to a bigger picture (foxes).

David Hain's insight:

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? And are you developing hedgehogs or foxes? In the digital, VUCA age, the answer may be increasingly important!

In 2010 Trust Across America introduced the FACTS® Framework, a comprehensive unbiased barometer of the corporate integrity of America’s largest 2000 US public companies. The Framework identifies companies whose leadership is going beyond doing just what is legal to choosing what is right in meeting all stakeholder needs. The FACTS® Framework is the most comprehensive and data driven ongoing study on this subject. We analyze companies quarterly and rank order showing trends by company, sector and market capitalization. Read more about the Framework at this link.

Every year since 2012 we have announced our “Top Ten Most Trustworthy Public Companies” via the Trust Across America blog. The following table displays the current returns of every annual list vs. the S&P 500 since its publication.

David Hain's insight:

More empirical proof that increasing trust pays out. Perhaps corporate integrity should be a target before shareholder value, as one seems to follow the other!

We are in a paradigm and most of us are blind to it. You could call it Theory X or top-down, but one way to summarise it is that we are in a parent-child paradigm. There have been shades of this throughout history but perhaps none more dominant than the Industrial Era which was fuelled by the worldview that employees, then largely uneducated, are naturally stupid and lazy and must be monitored, controlled and motivated.

Incredibly, this is still the prevailing paradigm in workplaces today. We might have upgraded it a little, but not much. (Just read this mind blowing article by Aeon about the ‘stupidity paradox’ in organisations.) But what about companies that invest heavily in employee engagement programmes and making their people happy? Often this is just a different shade of being a parent – either a caring parent, or a coercive parent! The underlying belief is still: “people need to be motivated and taken care of to be productive.”

“We already know how to be good parents at work. The alternative, partnership, is something we are just learning about. Our difficulty with creating partnership is that parenting – and its stronger cousin, patriarchy – is so deeply ingrained in our muscle memory and armature that we don’t even realise we are doing it.”

– Peter Block, Stewardship

David Hain's insight:

Paternalism is the enemy of genuinely distributed leadership. Bosses need to stop behaving like parents!

I agree, but having worked in private industry and in public schools I am not hopeful. What we need is to be attentive to the pretexts and subtexts of our organizations that lead to oppressive structures, so we can shift paradigms and liberate adults by treating them as responible, autonomous beings.

Is our objective to create algorithms so we can simply replace people who stand up? Being a rebel is fun. It upsets the ones who simply want conformity and compliance.

Being adult-adult doesn’t mean we get to do what we want or that there is a leadership vacuum. It means we are truly in a partnership, [responsible for our actions and] to each other.

“How do you make society both more productive and more humane at the same time?” Because if you think about it, it’s a beautiful, giant question. I think that the grandeur of that question and the idea that, “Okay, then you’re running a company,” or, “You’re running a non-profit,” or…you’re doing what sort of fits into that. But the idea of a, “how do you make things both more productive and more humane at the same time,” is one of those human questions.

David Hain's insight:

This is a pretty big question for leaders everywhere - marrying productivity and human wellbeing. The answer isn't shareholder value!

For a long time, researchers and economists believed that humans made logical, well-considered decisions. In recent decades, however, researchers have uncovered a wide range of mental errors that derail our thinking. Sometimes we make logical decisions, but there are many times when we make emotional, irrational, and confusing choices.

Psychologists and behavioral researchers love to geek out about these different mental mistakes. There are dozens of them and they all have fancy names like “mere exposure effect” or “narrative fallacy.” But I don’t want to get bogged down in the scientific jargon today. Instead, let’s talk about the mental errors that show up most frequently in our lives and break them down in easy-to-understand language.

Here are five common mental errors that sway you from making good decisions.

David Hain's insight:

Confirmation bias and other regular mental traps - enemies of good decisions!

In this article, we share the results of new research quantifying the financial benefits of processes that “debias” strategic decisions. The size of this prize makes a strong case for practicing behavioral strategy—a style of strategic decision making that incorporates the lessons of psychology. It starts with the recognition that even if we try, like Baron Münchhausen, to escape the swamp of biases by pulling ourselves up by our own hair, we are unlikely to succeed. Instead, we need new norms for activities such as managing meetings (for more on running unbiased meetings, see “Taking the bias out of meetings”), gathering data, discussing analogies, and stimulating debate that together can diminish the impact of cognitive biases on critical decisions. To support those new norms, we also need a simple language for recognizing and discussing biases, one that is grounded in the reality of corporate life, as opposed to the sometimes-arcane language of academia. All this represents a significant commitment and, in some organizations, a profound cultural change.

David Hain's insight:

Useful contribution to strategic decision making and how to prevent bias loss from McKinsey.

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